Friday, November 16, 2018

A Slovakian politician, the Speaker of the Parliament, has been accused of having copied his JuDR doctoral thesis in law from five other sources, according to Slovak media. The Spectator and Tasr are both reporting in English on the case. A JuDR, a degree offered in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, is not equivalent to a PhD, it is sometimes called the "little doctoral degree".

It seems that when the accusations first arose, the politician put his thesis in the university library under embargo. When complaints arose, he then made it possible to see the thesis, but not to take pictures or copy it.

Strangely, some alleged sources appear to have gone missing. The Spectator reports:

Meanwhile, Comenius University announced that a doctoral dissertation
with the same title and same number of pages is missing in its
university archive. As Dennik N reported, it was defended only one year
before D[...] defended his work at UMB. The last time someone borrowed it
to study was 2011. The university started an investigation to find out
where the dissertation could be.

Matej Bel University (UMB) in Banská Bystrica has set up a committee to investigate the allegations, but there are calls to have outside examiners be involved in this investigation, according the the Spectator. According to Tasr, the opposition has called for D[...] to step down:

Leader of non-parliamentary Progressive Slovakia Ivan Stefunko noted
that Hungary, Spain, Germany and the Czech Republic are countries where
ministers and a president have stepped down when mere suspicions of
plagiarism occurred.

A cartoon
("How should I know what's in my work", according to Google Translate)
can be found at Denník N, the newspaper which broke the story. They also
have one image of a side-by-side comparison (in Slovakian). Even without knowing the language, it looks like this page is what is known as a "pawn sacrifice" [1]: There is a quotation in the middle with a reference number 8. Assuming this is referring to the source, one can see that the copy of the text continues after the quotation marks, and highly similar text is also found before the quotation.

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Copy, Shake, and Paste

This blog is written by a German professor, Debora Weber-Wulff, who has been researching about plagiarism since 2002. She runs a German-language "Portal Plagiat" that regularly tests plagiarism detection software. She is also a member of the "Computing and Ethics" group of the German computing society, GI, and active in the VroniPlag Wiki.

Impressum

This blog on scientific misconduct is run by Prof. Dr. Debora Weber-Wulff in Berlin, Germany. She can be reached at
blogger (dot) 10 (dot) weberwu (at) spamgourmet (dot) com
Many thanks to spamgourmet for this service!
The rest of the Impressum is in German to comply with German publication regulations. Thanks to jurabilis for permission to use!

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